Cell cycle regulation plays a critical role in neoplastic disease, as well as disease caused by non-cancerous, pathologically proliferating cells. Identifying membrane proteins, their ligands, and downstream signal transduction pathways is important for developing therapeutic regents to treat cancer and other proliferative diseases.
In recent years, there have been major developments in the understanding of the cell cycle. Normal cell proliferation is tightly regulated by the activation and deactivation of a series of proteins that constitute the cell cycle machinery. The expression and activity of components of the cell cycle can be altered during the development of a variety of human disease such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, psoriasis, etc., where aberrant proliferation contributes to the pathology of the illness. There are genetic screens to isolate critical components for cell cycle regulation using different organisms such as yeast, worms, flies etc., since cell cycle regulation is the most common machinery among all eukaryotic cells. However, there is a need to establish screening for understanding human diseases caused by disruption of cell cycle regulation and for the development of new therapeutics.